Cloud Computing, Application Infrastructure, and things I find interesting in real life

Saturday, 24 January 2015

Exalogic Elastic Cloud 12c Software and Exalogic X5-2 Hardware Launch

We're excited to announce the release of the first of two fundamental innovations in Oracle Exalogic - our planned 12c Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software and our new X5-2 hardware, the latter of which is available immediately.

Beginning with software, we're seeing a massive shift from traditional pure virtualization to cloud. In our 12c release, Exalogic is aligning with Oracle's public cloud to offer the same IaaS and PaaS layers, with Java Cloud Service being offered as our first PaaS solution. By adopting the same IaaS and PaaS layers, we're able to offer our customers the exact same experience whether on or off premise. Performance continues to be a defining characteristic of Oracle Exalogic, with workloads having 5-10x greater performance and throughput compared to traditional systems.

To see how we got to this point, let's look back at the 1990s.That era was characterized by big monolithic apps running on large, non-virtualized servers. This is known as "Generation 0." In the 2000s, many workloads were virtualized. This is known as "Generation 1." While an enormous evolution over physical, virtualization didn't change the equation all that much - in fact it made it worse. Rather than having one large server, there are many smaller virtual machines. The maintenance problems only multiplied as it became easier to provision virtual machines.

In today's world, cloud is beginning to take over and Oracle is the leading vendor in the transition to cloud. Cloud is known as "Generation 2." Cloud offers virtualization as well but it offers a number of new features that make it distinct from Generation 1. Cloud offers simple provisioning, elasticity to support ever-changing workloads, automated backup/recovery/patching and more. Resources - from compute to network to storage to Java - are offered up as services, with the consumer of the services detached from the back-end work required to offer and maintain the services. As much as possible, end-consumers provision some software, with the hardware behind the software being provided, configured, updated, backed-up seamlessly. Cloud is often consumed off premise, but with the introduction of Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 12c, customers will be able to consume the same IaaS and PaaS services in Oracle's public cloud, or on premise on Oracle Exalogic hardware.

Exalogic X5-2 is the next Generation of our hardware platform, built to support Generation 2 (although the 12c software will support existing hardware platforms). Ahead of defining specifications for the platform, we performed extensive research to look at how we can continue to have a balanced architecture to support the workloads our customers have. Thinking of Exalogic X5-2 in the context of a Generation 2 cloud model, high density of virtual machines on each individual server is a prerequisite, in addition to a shared network, storage system and most important, high I/O throughput (which is achieved through Exabus on Exalogic). In order to deliver on a balanced architecture, we've increased the density of cores per compute node up to 36, meaning customers can have up to 1,080 physical cores in a single rack of Oracle Exalogic X5-2. There are a number of other enhancements including a move to DDR4 to provide faster memory, an increase in SSD per compute node to 800 GB, and an 800 GB write cache in our storage appliance. Collectively, these changes make Exalogic X5-2 the best available hardware platform for Generation 2 computing. Want to know more about what customers are doing with Exalogic? Listen to these two customers speak about their use of Exalogic a the X5 launch. Aaron de Los Reyes speaks about 9x reduction in hardware footprint and 50% operational cost savings. Did you know that Exalogic also powers the heart of Silicon Valley? City of San Francisco's Dennis McCormick speaks about their use of Exalogic and Exadata.

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